7 ms·

Tuna are spawning in marine protected areas

140 points by el_duderino 7y ago

ergothus 7y ago
> The researchers observed multiple species of tuna larvae throughout this protected expanse Somehow I've gone over 40 years without realizing that fish have a larval stage.
- andy_ppp 7y ago
  You haven’t heard of caviar? (-:
  - ngold 7y ago
    Fish eggs and huge ocean bugs slathered in butter are somehow a delicacy? Go figure.
    - rudyfink 7y ago
      You might enjoy David Foster Wallace's delightful article "Consider the Lobster" http://www.gourmet.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobsterd996.html?printable=true http://www.gourmet.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ma... : "Up until sometime in the 1800s, though, lobster was literally low-class food, eaten only by the poor and institutionalized. Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats. "
      - Danieru 7y ago
        Was it cooked the same as lobster now is done?
        anthony_doan 7y ago
        If you're asking what changed. Then it's because railway passengers where given lobster. As for if it really changed, I can't imagine it change so much into the steam style lobster of today (unless you're from Louisiana canjun/creole style).
        Alex3917 7y ago
        Lobster that are more than a couple pounds are generally pretty gross, and back then they were probably like 10 lb lobsters on average.
        traeregan 7y ago
        I caught and ate a 12 pound spiny lobster recently and it was as good as any smaller lobster I’ve ever eaten (many!).
- pvaldes 7y ago
  Yup, reproduction in fishes is "imaginative", sex is complicated and things can turn bizarre easily. https://australianmuseum.net.au/blog-archive/science/large-muraenid-leptocephali/ https://australianmuseum.net.au/blog-archive/science/large-m...
- flukus 7y ago
  I'm in the same boat, I assume like me you were thinking of larvae and maggots as being synonymous, but it looks like with fish the larval stage is more tadpole like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthyoplankton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthyoplankton
  - ergothus 7y ago
    I knew of tadpoles, and I knew fish eggs, but somehow I guess I just imagined fish hatching as tiny fish.
nisten 7y ago
So by not fishing at all in the protected 11% portion of their fishing area, they're projected to get more fish due to the spillover effect. Well, no surprises there. We rarely ever do these economic projections. They can apply to so many more areas, like the forests in Indonesia where they're discovering new antibiotic compounds in shrubs, or the spider habitats whose venom is used in producing heart medication, they're probably a lot more expensive than some lumber and cornfields. I feel like if we communicated environmental protection more materialistically instead of emotionally, people would have an easier time convincing their politicians to actually enact it. If we're gonna calculate 25-30 year mortgages for homes than we should probably do environmental risk projections too in dollar figures for those kinds of time frames.
- bglazer 7y ago
  One argument against this position is that economic environmentalism cuts both ways. Sure Sure, marine preserves produce an economically beneficial surplus of salmon. Also, the oil reserves in the Arctic national wildlife refuge are worth more than 500 billion dollars. In the case of Arctic drilling, I think the moral argument against destroying wilderness is the only viable option.
  - noahth 7y ago
    There is a strong economic argument for keeping oil in the ground now, though. Namely, that the planet will cease to support a functioning global economy under runaway warming.
    - hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
      That oil could theoretically be burned and the carbon sequestered. Hence no climate impact. The hazard to fragile ecosystems from an industrial accident is still huge. Edit: the point is that some environmental protection actions have to be driven by moral/ethical forces. We can't leave everything to the economy. Having said this there might be ways to use market forces to implement the ethically required environmental protections.
jbattle 7y ago
To show my kids a bit about programming we made a simple rabbits-and-foxes simulation. Little dots moving around a rectangle drawn on the screen. The red ones were rabbits, would move mostly randomly, and would periodically make a baby rabbit. The blue ones were foxes and would chase nearby rabbits. When they caught one they'd eat it and make a baby fox. Fun to watch but we found no matter how we set the initial counts of rabbits and foxes, inevitably there'd be a population spike of rabbits, which would cause a lot of foxes to be born, which would eat enough rabbits (sometimes ALL of them) that the rest of the foxes would starve and go extinct. We tweaked all kinds of parameters about how they move and how they reproduce and nothing kept the system from oscillating into a broken state. Eventually we added a "rabbit preserve" - an area rabbits could pass freely through but foxes couldn't enter. Just like that - the system was stable(ish). There would still be population peaks and valleys but as long as the preserve was reasonably large the rabbit population might crater but wouldn't crash. Its a nice little project, easy to code and fun to watch
- losteric 7y ago
  Fox predators, aging, and/or direct competition (fighting) could be an interesting lesson in dampening feedback to reduce those oscillations. Simulating grass carrying capacity, other herbivore competition, different predator niches, etc all further increase stability / resilience to change.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  Add earthworms. ;- )
  - alanh 7y ago
    Is this a joke or reference, perhaps?
- jt2190 7y ago
  My understanding is that lion prides are territorial, but the herds they prey on are not. The prides with prey in their territory eat; those without starve. This sounds similar to the “preserve” system that you’ve hit upon, except that the preserves change location over time based on the number of predators, and the prey group into herds.
Symbiote 7y ago
This is the original article. It's open access! I'm surprised MIT's press release doesn't link to it. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-47161-0 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-47161-0

140 points by el_duderino 7y ago

> The researchers observed multiple species of tuna larvae throughout this protected expanse Somehow I've gone over 40 years without realizing that fish have a larval stage.

andy_ppp 7y ago
You haven’t heard of caviar? (-:
- ngold 7y ago
  Fish eggs and huge ocean bugs slathered in butter are somehow a delicacy? Go figure.
  - rudyfink 7y ago
    You might enjoy David Foster Wallace's delightful article "Consider the Lobster" http://www.gourmet.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/magazine/2000s/2004/08/consider_the_lobsterd996.html?printable=true http://www.gourmet.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/ma... : "Up until sometime in the 1800s, though, lobster was literally low-class food, eaten only by the poor and institutionalized. Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats. "
    - Danieru 7y ago
      Was it cooked the same as lobster now is done?
      - anthony_doan 7y ago
        If you're asking what changed. Then it's because railway passengers where given lobster. As for if it really changed, I can't imagine it change so much into the steam style lobster of today (unless you're from Louisiana canjun/creole style).
      - Alex3917 7y ago
        Lobster that are more than a couple pounds are generally pretty gross, and back then they were probably like 10 lb lobsters on average.
        traeregan 7y ago
        I caught and ate a 12 pound spiny lobster recently and it was as good as any smaller lobster I’ve ever eaten (many!).
pvaldes 7y ago
Yup, reproduction in fishes is "imaginative", sex is complicated and things can turn bizarre easily. https://australianmuseum.net.au/blog-archive/science/large-muraenid-leptocephali/ https://australianmuseum.net.au/blog-archive/science/large-m...
flukus 7y ago
I'm in the same boat, I assume like me you were thinking of larvae and maggots as being synonymous, but it looks like with fish the larval stage is more tadpole like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthyoplankton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ichthyoplankton
- ergothus 7y ago
  I knew of tadpoles, and I knew fish eggs, but somehow I guess I just imagined fish hatching as tiny fish.

nisten 7y ago

So by not fishing at all in the protected 11% portion of their fishing area, they're projected to get more fish due to the spillover effect. Well, no surprises there. We rarely ever do these economic projections. They can apply to so many more areas, like the forests in Indonesia where they're discovering new antibiotic compounds in shrubs, or the spider habitats whose venom is used in producing heart medication, they're probably a lot more expensive than some lumber and cornfields. I feel like if we communicated environmental protection more materialistically instead of emotionally, people would have an easier time convincing their politicians to actually enact it. If we're gonna calculate 25-30 year mortgages for homes than we should probably do environmental risk projections too in dollar figures for those kinds of time frames.

bglazer 7y ago
One argument against this position is that economic environmentalism cuts both ways. Sure Sure, marine preserves produce an economically beneficial surplus of salmon. Also, the oil reserves in the Arctic national wildlife refuge are worth more than 500 billion dollars. In the case of Arctic drilling, I think the moral argument against destroying wilderness is the only viable option.
- noahth 7y ago
  There is a strong economic argument for keeping oil in the ground now, though. Namely, that the planet will cease to support a functioning global economy under runaway warming.
  - hdfbdtbcdg 7y ago
    That oil could theoretically be burned and the carbon sequestered. Hence no climate impact. The hazard to fragile ecosystems from an industrial accident is still huge. Edit: the point is that some environmental protection actions have to be driven by moral/ethical forces. We can't leave everything to the economy. Having said this there might be ways to use market forces to implement the ethically required environmental protections.

jbattle 7y ago

To show my kids a bit about programming we made a simple rabbits-and-foxes simulation. Little dots moving around a rectangle drawn on the screen. The red ones were rabbits, would move mostly randomly, and would periodically make a baby rabbit. The blue ones were foxes and would chase nearby rabbits. When they caught one they'd eat it and make a baby fox. Fun to watch but we found no matter how we set the initial counts of rabbits and foxes, inevitably there'd be a population spike of rabbits, which would cause a lot of foxes to be born, which would eat enough rabbits (sometimes ALL of them) that the rest of the foxes would starve and go extinct. We tweaked all kinds of parameters about how they move and how they reproduce and nothing kept the system from oscillating into a broken state. Eventually we added a "rabbit preserve" - an area rabbits could pass freely through but foxes couldn't enter. Just like that - the system was stable(ish). There would still be population peaks and valleys but as long as the preserve was reasonably large the rabbit population might crater but wouldn't crash. Its a nice little project, easy to code and fun to watch

losteric 7y ago
Fox predators, aging, and/or direct competition (fighting) could be an interesting lesson in dampening feedback to reduce those oscillations. Simulating grass carrying capacity, other herbivore competition, different predator niches, etc all further increase stability / resilience to change.
microcolonel 7y ago
Add earthworms. ;- )
- alanh 7y ago
  Is this a joke or reference, perhaps?
jt2190 7y ago
My understanding is that lion prides are territorial, but the herds they prey on are not. The prides with prey in their territory eat; those without starve. This sounds similar to the “preserve” system that you’ve hit upon, except that the preserves change location over time based on the number of predators, and the prey group into herds.

Symbiote 7y ago

This is the original article. It's open access! I'm surprised MIT's press release doesn't link to it. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-47161-0 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-47161-0